Posted tagged ‘Bill Putnam’

Memorial Day is the quietest of national holidays and probably should be even quieter still. It’s hard to say anything in honor of fallen soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors that isn’t inadequate to their loss and thus seems fraudulent and self-serving. Even so, it’s hard to resist saying something, and perhaps even necessary. Below are the names of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan with whom I served, taught, or knew well. All were good men, and their memory informs my sense of what war writing—to include Time Now—can do and be. Here’s to all the good men and women who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all those who died in our previous wars, too.

On the right in the photograph above is Captain David Taylor, one of my lieutenants when I commanded a company in the 82nd Airborne Division. In the picture, taken in 2001, he’s standing on a hill outside Gnjilane, Kosovo, where he served as a company commander in a task force of which I was the executive officer. In 2006, Major Taylor was killed in an IED attack in Baghdad.

I’m also thinking about First Sergeant John Blair, Sergeant First Class Kevin Dupont, and Staff Sergeant Alex French, all US Army advisor team members who died in action in Khost or Paktya province, Afghanistan, while I was there. Also, Specialist Peter Courcy and Private First Class Jason Watson, who were assigned to Camp Clark, as was I, when they died in an IED blast just outside Khost city. Colonel Ted Westhusing and Lieutenant Colonel Joe Fenty, friends who died in Iraq and Afghanistan respectively, and former students Captain Dennis Pintor, killed in Iraq, and First Lieutenant Todd Lambka, killed in Afghanistan. Finally, Major Bill Hecker, whom I knew only through email, but who before dying in Iraq in 2006, published a book on Edgar Allan Poe, an achievement that impressed me enormously.

In my thoughts, I also remember the deaths of allies who fought on our side in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the wars before.

Below is a photograph I took today in a small cemetery in Franklin Township, New Jersey, of a flag placed on the gravestone of a Revolutionary War veteran. I’m glad he is remembered and now add my measure of tribute.

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The photojournalist creed is that news photographs are neither staged nor edited. Credibility depends on the collective belief of editors, readers, and peers that a photojournalist’s work represents objective reality. Of course there is artistry and craft involved in technical choices about cameras and film and in subjective decisions about which frame of many to transmit and publish. But the basic premise is that photographs, especially those taken of conflict, constitute reliable documentary evidence.

Photojournalist Brian Walski, for example, was scandalized early in the Iraq War when he merged two pictures together to create a more striking image that was subsequently published in the Los Angeles Times. Walski was fired and the Times forced to issue an apology for violating press photography ethical prohibitions on altering original photographs.

Later, New York Times photographer Damon Winter earned prizes for photographs taken in Afghanistan with an Iphone. But controversy arose concerning Winter’s use of the Hipstamatic editing app. To photojournalist purists, doing so represented an egregious after-the-fact manipulation of images meant to register as “authentic” and “credible.”

But Winter was not the only one who experimented with up-to-the-minute apps and techniques. Ann Davlin, in an article for the photography website Photodoto called “The Latest Photographic Trends to Defeat Your Competitors,”surveyed Instagram to determine what were the most popular editing tricks of the first decade of the new millennium–a period that roughly coincides with our contemporary wars. Intrigued by the article, I searched the Internet and my own stock of photographs for war images that also illustrate the techniques Davlin describes.

The most popular trend Davlin notes is one I’ve already mentioned: “phoneography,” or the use of phone cameras. I’ve featured Bill Putnam’s work many times on this blog because I think the world of it. Putnam is a hardcore camera geek who Tweets things like “The @16x9inc adapter is Heavy. Solid. Huge, bigger than I expected. But workable. Same compression of a 60 but view of a 27. #dlsr#video.“ But on his last deployment to Afghanistan, he took many pictures with an Iphone and used Hipstamatic to enhance them. The Iphone, he reports, was just ever-handy, and potential subjects rarely blanched at requests for pictures.

Second on Davlin’s list is “macrophotography,” or extreme close-ups. Again I’ll use a Bill Putnam example:

“HDR photography” refers to “high dynamic range” manipulation and editing of images to create special lighting effects. Sounds technical, but you’ll recognize the effect as soon as you see it below:

“Light painting” refers to emphasizing or highlighting streaks of light:

Davlin’s next category is “nostalgic photography,” or the creation of vintage effects through the use of apps such as Hipstamatic. USAF airman Ed Drew took nostalgic photography a step further by actually employing 19th-century tintype techniques to capture pictures of his fellow airmen in Afghanistan:

“Panoramic” or “wide-angle photography” is the last of the popular special effects listed by Davlin. A great example is below:

In addition to the categories proposed by Davlin, a few other motifs or trends exemplify contemporary combat photography. The first is night optic technique and style:

The second is not so much a style or technique but a contemporary means of distributing and consuming images: photography (and video) that reflects the influence of reality TV, video share services such as YouTube, TV news video, and close circuit surveillance aesthetics. The video below, taken by a security camera at a small outpost in Afghanistan, is not for the faint-hearted. Live footage taken about five miles away from where I was at the time, it shows a car bomb explosion that killed 13 Afghan children.

My final category is photography that reflects the aesthetics of drone warfare or first-person shooter games. My examples are not actual photographs from the warzones, but I little doubt that envisioning the war from the aspect of a UAV reigning carnage from the sky or a soldier aiming down the barrel of a weapon permeates our optical sense of how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have unfolded:

War photojournalism and artistic photography bring to the fore questions about treating violence and suffering as aesthetic subjects. How are we supposed to respond when we view graphic images that seem to glorify or prettify war? On what terms can a graphic image be considered beautiful? The ethical and aesthetic questions become even more complicated when photographers self-consciously manipulate images using the latest technology to generate effect. I’ll have more to say on these questions in future posts.

Please take time to explore the web presence of the photographers whose work I have featured in this post. Official websites and Facebook pages below:

A trip to DC allowed to reconnect with Bill Putnam, the former US Army combat cameraman and embedded journalist whose work I have featured many times in this blog. Bill and I first met in Kosovo in 2002 where we were both part of Task Force 2-14, based in Camp Monteith in the northern part of the American sector. Later Bill served in Iraq as both a soldier and a civilian photojournalist and then twice in Afghanistan, first with the 101st Airborne Division in Paktika province and then in Helmand at Camp Leatherneck as the public affairs officer for a unit charged with training Afghan security forces. He currently lives in Washington and is going to school while looking for new photographic opportunities.

For me, Bill’s pictures are so alert to their subjects’ eyes that they read like uncanny straight shots into whatever it is the subjects think most important. What they most want you to know, or what they most need to hide, or both. Below, for example, is a shot Bill took of Afghan National Police recruits in training at Camp Leatherneck.

In DC, we met at a dark, moody bar blasting classic and contemporary punk rock—hell yea–and traded our stories and plotted future projects. Bill told me the backstory of the pictures I’ve published here and brought me up-to-date on his current endeavors. Here’s to you, Bill, and thanks for everything you’ve contributed to Time Now–you’re a true acolyte-of-war, now moving on to other things.

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A few posts back I wrote about soldiers dozing, or sitting silently and thinking, on their flights back to the United States after deployment. I asked photographer Bill Putnam for a picture to accompany the piece, but Bill was busy and didn’t send me anything until a few days ago. The photos he finally delivered weren’t of a flight home, but of soldiers sleeping and hanging out in their dark hootches while on an outpost in Paktika province, Afghanistan. They immediately sent me into a reverie of memory and association, not just of my own deployment, but of a great Walt Whitman poem called “The Sleepers.”

First published in 1855, “The Sleepers” begins:

I wander all night in my vision,

Stepping with light feet . . . . swiftly and noiselessly

stepping and stopping,

Bending with open eyes over the shut eyes of sleepers

The poet then describes a freak show of damaged sleeping bodies that include…

The gashed bodies on battlefields, the insane in their strong-doored

rooms, the sacred idiots,

The newborn emerging from gates and the dying emerging

from gates

The poet tells us, “The night pervades them and enfolds them” and soon the journey becomes not just physical and literal but symbolic and visionary and the poet doesn’t just describe but inhabits the bodies of the sleepers.

I go from bedside to bedside . . . . I sleep close with the

other sleepers, each in turn;

I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers,

And I become the other dreamers.

I am a dance . . . . Play up there! the fit is whirling me fast.

Soon to come are passages featuring Lucifer, George Washington, a red squaw Indian, and lots of sexual coupling and release. A smart critic writes:

“In ‘The Sleepers’ Whitman dramatizes a dream vision or psychological journey in which he penetrates a realm of existence–both within himself and in the world–that transcends time and space and finite human limits. . . . Through his dream the poet confronts the chaos and confusion of the mind and the facts of suffering and death. He discovers spirit, as well, and thereby comes to know the possibilities for human life. He possesses all of existence through his vision. . . .”

That makes sense, a little, of a crazy-but-wonderful poem. Please check it out in its entirety and let me know what you think. My favorite lines come near the end:

I swear they are all beautiful,

Every one that sleeps is beautiful . . . . every thing in the

dim night is beautiful,

The wildest and bloodiest is over and all is peace.

Which brings us back to Bill Putnam’s pictures of the dark, sleepy in-between times of a combat tour. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

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I’m bringing these pictures back to the top because Bill Putnam has emailed me information about them that is worth sharing. Earlier I had written that they were from 2007-2008. As you will read, I was off by several years. I wrote that they were grim-but-beautiful artifacts from a grim, not-beautiful time. I wasn’t wrong about that. Below are Bill’s comments:

The photos were taken in Iraq during my time there as a freelancer between September and November 2005. The top two were shot during a stay with a Stryker company in eastern Mosul, around the walls of Ninevah. The bottom was made on Bayji Island near Bayji, Iraq.

A bit about each… It’s funny you picked three of my favorites from that time.

The top one was made fairly early in the morning after an all-night raid. The unit, Centurion Company, 2-1 Infantry, had been sent out with an SF team and bunch of Iraqi Army to hunt down a car bomb builder. They didn’t find him. This was early in the unit’s deployment (they were the guys who were extended in 2006 for three months during an early and not so effective “surge” into northwest Baghdad). To me it says a lot, not really about that war, but just war in general, especially war down at the nasty end of the spear. Hunter, the guy pictured, just looks exhausted. War is exactly that – exhausting in every sense – but this is physical exhaustion. The kid waving the gun (it was unloaded) was actually playing with a newly-installed laser pointer.

The middle photo was made in a Stryker as the company was heading back from a meeting with an Iraqi police colonel in a precinct. I liked the detail of this kid (I’ve forgotten his name, sorry) as we ride back to the FOB.

The bottom photo was made during my first week of a two-month embed with Abu Company, 1-187th Infantry. Unlike the first two which were shot digitally, this was shot with black-and-white film on a Leica rangefinder camera. It was early in the morning of the op’s second day. The two guys on the right are Bill and Michael, the platoon’s RTO and doc. The guy off in the distance is Tim, the platoon sergeant. The whole battalion was out there looking for weapon caches, doing what all grunts do in a counter-insurgency (even if we weren’t calling it that back then). If I remember it was cold that morning. We’d spent that night huddled in an abandoned house. The guys were tired and you can see that in Bill and Mike’s body language.

Thanks, Bill, for your photos and your comments. We look forward to seeing the best of your current work documenting the transition of military responsibility in Afghanistan from US to Afghan control.

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This picture by Bill Putnam shows a US Army patrol taking a brief halt on top of an Afghanistan hill.

I like it for its muted color palette–grey, green, brown, some black–and the array of emotions reflected in the faces and bodies of the soldiers. Some are relaxed, others display tension. Their equipment hangs upon them not obtrusively, but organically, even the weird mounts for night vision goggles that protrude from their helmets like antennas and the M4 in the foreground that seemingly sits far too high on its bearer’s torso. The way their gazes go off in different directions and the bulb like prominence of the helmets reminds me of Larry Burrows’ great picture of a hilltop scene taken during the Vietnam War:

Burrows’ picture is far more dramatic, of course, and rightfully famous. But who’s to say the soldiers in Bill Putnam’s picture aren’t themselves minutes away from a similar scene of devastation and carnage?

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What is Time Now?

This blog features art, music, film, and literature about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagined representations of the wars have begun to accrue variety and complexity. Still, no website I know of devotes itself to cataloging and discussing these artworks--a great lack in my opinion, since in the final analysis our artists will explain best how the wars were experienced and how they are remembered.

"Time now," in military radio-speak, refers to the present moment. Most commonly the phrase is used in reports such as, "We're returning to base, time now," or, "Request artillery support, time now." I like its urgency, the way it doesn't just name but intensifies the temporal dimension of the event to which it refers. Kind of like the way art intensifies the life it represents, so as to make it both more understandable and more deeply felt.

Who Am I?

I am a former Army officer who served in infantry units at Fort Drum, New York; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and in Korea. In 2008-2009, I was an advisor to Afghan National Army forces in Khost and Paktya provinces in Afghanistan.